‘I feel like it’s serendipity that I came here today.’ Amanda could have hugged this woman.
‘It was meant to be, wasn’t it?’ Maggie beamed at her and Amanda nodded.
‘It absolutely was,’ Amanda said, though she suddenly felt a gnawing sense that something wasn’t right with Diana’s story and she was almost afraid to find out the truth.
*
Diana – 1960s
Diana was allowed out of Moongate until she was six months pregnant but then her mother found many reasons for her not to go to Newcastle or even the village of Foxfield.
So Diana decided to do the unthinkable and went to Newcastle with Helen when her mother was at bridge and her father was in Manchester, in order to sit for her driving test. She had practised on Helen’s dad’s car without anyone knowing – apart from Helen – while he was at Moongate working in the garden. They had driven on the road a few times and hadn’t killed themselves or anyone else, so Diana thought she was ready to sit for her licence.
It wasn’t so hard and even though she messed up the parking a little, she had put her hand on her belly and looked sadly at the man testing her and said, ‘How will my baby and I get around?’
The man had taken pity on her when she explained her husband was at sea and was hoping she would pass the test.
The next stop was a pawn shop in the Grainger Market, where Diana took her small Omega dress watch and a pair of sapphire earrings that were a present from her godparents in India.
She slipped off the gold ring she had borrowed from her mother’s jewellery box for the driving test. She would return it when she went home but now she needed the man in the pawn shop to feel her plight.
She opened up her coat and went into the shop and put the items on the glass counter.
‘Yeah?’ asked the young man who had a jeweller’s loop around his neck and hair down to his collar. He was wearing very fashionable clothing, as though he had come from London, and he smelled of exotic cigarettes that Diana had once smelled at a party held by students from Northumbria University.
‘Hello, how much could I get for these?’
The man looked at the watch, turning it over in his hands. Then he looked at the earrings through the loop. ‘Fifty quid,’ he said.
Diana scoffed the way her father would if he had been here.
‘Thanks anyway, but that’s not going to help me at this stage.’ She touched her stomach and he looked at her and then the earrings again.
‘Seventy.’
‘I could get three hundred alone for those earrings in Hatton Garden.’
‘Then you better head off to Hatton Garden, love,’ he said.
She held her nerve.
He kept picking up the earrings and putting them down. She knew he liked them more than he would tell her.
‘One hundred,’ he said.
‘One fifty,’ she countered.
He paused and then nodded and pulled out the receipt book and started writing.
Half an hour later, she was in a car yard in Tyne and Wear, with Helen looking worried.
‘This looks like a place where stray dogs live,’ Helen whispered.
‘Maybe they do, but when I get my car, we can drive away quick sticks,’ Diana said a with a smile.
This was the smartest thing she had ever done, she thought, as a man came towards her with the keys to the blue Hillman Imp.
‘All yours, darling, drive safe,’ said the man.
